Where did the time go?

There’s this Mo’ Babies Challenge where mom-bloggers are supposed to help out some interesting new moms by reminiscing about those first few days home with a baby.

Those days, for me, are mostly a haze, but here’s what I remember: Sophie was nursing. Sophie was always nursing, then, it seems. And even though it was challenging to sit there for so many hours of every day, nursing her, it was also miraculous. No one will ever trust me this completely again, I thought. No one will ever even smell this marvellous again. Ben called her Lil Stick of Butter, because she smelled like sweet cream (she sometimes still does – but now when I lean in to inhale the back of her neck, she gives me a funny look and starts tickling me). Back then, she fit along our forearms, she just rested there, blithely living her life as one big trust fall.

She was one of those few things that you can look at for hours and not get bored. A campfire, ocean waves, and newborn babies: that is it, those are the only things that I can happily look at for hours like that.

Oh, those little eyes, that head, that nose. I can still stare at this photo for far too long.

But here’s my story: Sophie was nursing, and Ben was out surfing or diaper-shopping or something, and the doorbell rang. I figured it was one of our friends who kept stopping by to give us wonderful food and then leave. So I just picked up Sophie and walked her to the door. She held on, still nursing.

It was a delivery-man on the other side of the door. Our birth-class teacher had told us that it’s natural to lose all modesty in the later stages of birth, and I didn’t have much modesty to begin with — but at this point, a week or so after the birth, even I should have known that it’s not great to answer the door to a stranger with your boobs hanging out. The delivery-guy did look at my bare breasts, but he quickly pulled his eyes up to mine and — God bless him – sincerely announced, “You have a new baby! That’s wonderful.”

So that’s what I remember. No matter how goofily I acted, the world celebrated my baby.